Sam Gentile recently presented at Boston’s Code Camp II: http://samgentile.com/blog/archive/2004/10/17/12235.aspx.
Most importantly he posted slides to the best Mobile Dev Presentation I have
seen yet – even though I have only read the slides, most of them make a lot of
sense and summarize important ground.

Very soon I may just email Sam and ask very politely if he
will permit some of the material to be re-used in Atlanta’s first Mobile Dev SIG meeting.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been scouring the web
for information on Mobile Development. There is a lot of interest, but the
space seems littered with blogs of people who were once very enthusiastic, but
suddenly went silent. Can one assume they found non-mobile related work, and
feeding one’s family wins over love for small shiny devices?

My own view is that more large companies will soon start integrating mobile devices with their Enterprise systems.
WeRock247 (http://www.learn247.net/werock247/)
demonstrates the amalgamation of many Microsoft technologies to integrate many
classic business problems. It does what many companies don’t yet achieve
(certainly not seamlessly): taking the software to remote information workers
such as warehouse pickers and delivery guys. I am leaning towards presenting
their ideas at our Mobile SIG. There should be much excitement to come in this
arena, take RFID (ignore privacy issues for now) - just think how it will
improve supply chain management. Today tech firms are struggling with where to locate RFID readers and the timing of synchronizations; what if every
employee carried a Mobile device that included
such a reader? Using a little P2P magic (like FedEx/UPS do) and the central
server should have a good real-time picture of where the
company’s inventory is. Maybe I read too much SciFi as a child, but I’m on this
bus.